I've fled KDE before when they launched the public alpha as a major release. Since back then it's improved hugely in terms of performance and usability. I used to be a Gnome fan, but the new UI, while usable on the TV, is unusable on the dev box.

About the bling and widgets/plasmoids I just don't use them so they're not a problem. It's a way of attracting a certain user group.

wbr1 writes: It seems abundantly clear now that Dice and the SlashBeta designers do not care one whit about the community here. They do not care about rolling in crapware into sourceforge installers. In short, the only thing that talks to them is money and stupid ideas.

Granted, it takes cash to run sites like these, but they were fine before. The question is, do some of you here want to band together, get whatever is available of slashcode and rebuild this community somewhere else? We can try to make it as it once was, a haven of geeky knowledge and frosty piss, delivered free of charge in a clean community moderated format.

mugnyte writes: With Slashdot's recent restyled "BETA" slowly rolled to most users, there's been a lot of griping about the changes. This is nothing new, as past style changes have had similar effects. However, this pass there are significant usability changes: A narrower read pane, limited moderation filtering, and several color/size/font adjustments. BETA implies not yet complete, so taking that cue — please list your specific, detailed opinoins, one per comment, and let's use the best part of slashdot (the moderation system) to raise the attention to these. Change can be jarring, but let's focus on the true usability differences with the new style.Link to Original Source

castrox writes: Apparently the NSA has decided on full blown warfare against people's private life and decided it was a good idea to record and store address books off of people accounts. Many popular service providers are affected such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Facebook and Gmail.

castrox writes: "Ars Technica writes that the European Commission has published research based on samples from 16,000 users. The research suggests there are no correlation between piracy and decreased sales, but very well the opposite. This leads to the conclusion that music piracy should not be a "concern for copyright holders".

This video is lame. What did these guys accomplish? It is kind of hard to tell. 10 projectors + smoke. A guy claims there is a sphere -- well I do not see it. Now he says he is walking inside the sphere. Still do not see it.

castrox writes: "Sharing links online, particularly links to copyrighted material, may render you extradited to the United States of America.

The case is unique because the site, which the accused 23-year-old Englishman ran, was not located in the US in any way. Does this set a new precedent of things to come?

The agency responsible for the extradition request is Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After contacting the site operator, shutting down the.com and.cc domain and finally paying the guy a visit in person, extradition is now on the table.

Okay, so everyone thinks the cost is directly financial. What about the cost in PR?

This company just got mentioned in article after article in just about every newspaper on the globe. No pretty headlines, either. Lax security. Leaked data again? Oh.

The direct cost might be possible to calculate - but the cost of no one trusting Sony with personal data could disrupt their online business entirely.

The rootkit disaster, as often mentioned, still sits in all of our minds and everyone we talk with. Do not underestimate the badwill. Want to be a contender? Do not fuck up - this economy will not allow it.

The cloud crap gets another black eye and this one is hardly deserving, considering the immense lack of competence security-wise on Sony's part.

castrox writes: "Oracle gives up on development of the commercial branch of OpenOffice. The reason appears to be the drain of mindshare from OpenOffice to the newly created, vendor neutral, LibreOffice fork. Control is to be handed over to the community. I guess we'll see the details to this handover in the coming days or weeks."Link to Original Source

Well, of course there are a range views on what sort of development folks in different parts of different metro areas want. Generally though, most folks who have actually thought about these issues (and understand that no car will actually be getting 200+ MPG even in 2015 because the numbers are based on an odd formula including battery life) will not rail against verdant suburbs.

The changes, we need are quite specific:1)Less Exurban development2)Making suburbs more walkable and bikeable3)Connecting suburbs to real cities with real transit

Of course, other folks might take a harder line, but real cities that have proper development will fair best in the long term both economically and quality of life.

Your question is interesting and one which many people ask themselves. I think it's more like people have one wallet to use and instead of spending money on music they kind of like they spend it on other things - just because they can get it by downloading. The total economic output is however more or less constant. I can only refer to my own spending statistics so feel free to contradict me. I don't put that same money in my savings account! I use it to go to the movies (5 of them past 6 months), fuel my car, go on vacation.

So the recent legislations in e.g. Sweden and the rest of Europe has nothing to do with economics, but rather only distribution of money and "fairness" to the companies. Of course, to succeed they must squash many citizen rights and deploy surveillance to keep citizens in check. One could argue that the win from such legislation really is nothing in comparison of how trampled the citizens become. Of course, the new legislation opens up a can of worms to further reduction of rights sort of like Pandora's box. We end up moving in the wrong direction if what we want is democracy.//S